- 1 Post
- 1 Comment
Joined 2Y ago
Cake day: Jul 04, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.
The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:
1. Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
2. Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
3. Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
4. Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.
Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.
If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.
I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they’ve negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I’d say at worst they’re net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they’re happy to take.